An often compelling story, marred by underdeveloped character relationships and an overreliance on summary.
A young British mother must overcome an abusive relationship and other adversities in Francis’ debut novel.
Lauren is born into a working-class family along with her twin, Lorna. The two are different from the start: Lauren fights bullies while Lorna stays quiet; Lauren has adventures while Lorna plays it safe. Their relationship becomes further strained after a park manager molests Lauren; she copes by withdrawing into herself, while Lorna leads a bustling social life. As a teenager, Lauren begins a halfhearted relationship with a schoolmate nicknamed Zitty. The two become engaged, and Lauren’s college plans are soon dashed when she becomes pregnant. She gives birth to four more children (one of whom dies from spina bifida), and Zitty becomes a violent alcoholic. Lauren eventually leaves him in a sequence tinged with danger—she hides all the knives in the house before he’s served divorce papers—and she begins life anew as a young single mother of four. She gets an education, opens a hair salon, marries and divorces a man almost as cruel as Zitty, and grieves the loss of both parents from cancer. Lauren’s love for her children is her driving force, and it’s also one of the book’s most moving elements. Details and dialogue, however, are scarce to a degree that would be more appropriate for a memoir than a novel; for example, a few major incidents, such as Lauren’s reluctant engagement to Zitty, are mentioned only in passing. Readers may finish the book still craving in-depth looks at some of Lauren’s relationships. For example, her interactions with Lorna seem especially fraught, but the book’s reliance on summary results in a lack of depth. In one scene, Lorna starts crying because of her fertility issues and Lauren rebukes her, but the author relates this bombshell situation with paraphrased dialogue. Still, despite these flaws, one can’t help but root for Francis’ protagonist as she struggles and triumphs over an abundance of obstacles.
An often compelling story, marred by underdeveloped character relationships and an overreliance on summary.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-7656-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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